A new, possibly Wii U game? Can we gloat now :p
While the words you hint strongly at a Wii U release, I'll be cautious until Nintendo says so.
This casts the touchscreen-controls patch and the recent, post-release demo in different light. Since Pikmin 3 was developed as a Wii game first, it didn't take advantage of the Wii U GamePad as much as some would've liked. Perhaps the development team found something with experimenting on the Pikmin 3 touchscreen controls on the GamePad.
If Nintendo's going to throw money away on a game that's going to bomb anyway, I'd rather they threw that money at a new Metroid or (heaven forbid) a new IP.
While VGchartz is unreliable, it does say that Pikmin 3 sold about 930k globally. Not sure if that's a bomb for Nintendo's coffers, though it is for a lot of other big companies. I'll grant you that Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid: Other M both sold 1.79m and 1.33m, respectively. As for new IP, hey, we got Code Name: STEAM and Splatoon this year. They can't press their luck all the time (though maybe they should).